Part One: Dr. Sleep: The Australian Psychiatrist Who Made People Sleep Themselves To Death

Summary

Behind the Bastards – Part One: Dr. Sleep: The Australian Psychiatrist Who Made People Sleep Themselves To Death

Podcast: Behind the Bastards (Cool Zone Media / iHeartPodcasts)
Host: Robert Evans
Guest: Gabe Dunn
Date: March 3, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode investigates Dr. Harry Bailey, an Australian psychiatrist who became infamous for his use of “deep sleep therapy” – a treatment where patients were forcibly sedated, leading ultimately to the deaths of many in his care. Robert Evans and guest Gabe Dunn unpack Bailey’s background, the disturbing history of psychiatric care in the West, the development and misuse of sedation therapy, and the perverse financial incentives that shaped Chelmsford Private Hospital. The discussion is darkly humorous, rich in historical context, and deeply skeptical about medical authority.

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Main Discussion Points & Insights

1. Introduction and Context

• Robert’s Location: Robert records from New Orleans rather than his usual Portland, setting a slightly off-kilter, humorous tone.
• Guest Intro: Gabe Dunn, writer/activist/podcast host, shares excitement about joining the show (00:42–01:20).
• Podcast Banter: Lighthearted jokes about umbrella culture, New Orleans, and anti-ICE activism set the conversational, irreverent tone.

2. Dr. Sleep: Dr. Harry Bailey’s Rise (06:47–20:18)

• Listener-Suggested Topic: Episode was inspired by a detailed fan submission about Bailey, who “made people sleep themselves to death” (08:00).
• Harry Bailey’s Early Life: Born 1922, working-class upbringing in Picton, NSW. Struggled financially, dropped out of school twice due to money (11:14–14:42).
• Medical Aspirations: Eventually completed his medical degree, excelled in psychiatry and pediatrics, winning awards quickly (16:48).
• Motivation: Early poverty seems to have instilled a desire for wealth and success, fueling later ethical lapses (15:08).

3. The State of Psychiatry: 20th Century “Care” (27:23–31:56)

• Historical Asylum Conditions: Early Australian asylums were brutal warehouses for anyone deemed unfit; “treatment” barely existed (28:12–29:17).
• Custodial Care: Even well-intended reformers struggled with overcrowding and underfunding; physical containment methods replaced with chemical restraint as sedatives (30:13–31:33).
• Path to Modern Psychiatry: By Bailey’s time, efforts shifted toward “treating” patients, but largely through heavy medication—not therapy.

4. The Birth of Deep Sleep Therapy (DST) (32:55–35:54)

• Premise: The theory: long periods of forced sleep could “reset” the brain for conditions like schizophrenia, mania, and insomnia.
• Methods: Extremely high doses of sedatives—chloral hydrate, amobarbital (street name “Blue Heavens”), and sodium thiopental—administered to induce comas lasting up to two weeks (37:06–39:00).
• Dangers:
  • Drugs were addictive, highly toxic, and caused severe withdrawal.
  • Risks included heart, lung failure, pneumonia, bedsores, and in many cases, death.
• Quote [Robert Evans, 37:47]:

  “Chloral hydrate is a real-ass drug... It’s also super addictive and causes lots of physical problems for patients, including heart and lung failure. So people who die pretty easily overdosing on this stuff.”

• Dark Humor & Relatability: Both hosts admit the idea of being sedated for weeks sounds momentarily appealing—before confronting its grim reality (39:00–41:39).

5. Early Studies: Shocking Results (43:44)

• Jacob Klaesi’s Experiment: Swiss psychiatrist’s initial study: 3 out of 26 patients died (12%), yet his methods inspired wider adoption in the 1950s–60s.
• Lack of Informed Consent: Patients weren’t told about risks; medical paternalism dominant (44:03–44:54).
• Quote [Gabe Dunn, 44:38]:

  "Not to victim blame, but I think you should ask every time you’re prescribed something, has this killed 12% of the people?"

6. Professional Condoning and Expansion

• Therapy Becomes Routine: Widely used for schizophrenia, depression, and insomnia. Some researchers kept patients out for mere hours; others extended to two weeks or more.
• Institutional Neglect: Overworked, understaffed hospitals cut corners, often leaving patients unconscious for dangerously long stretches without adequate care or hygiene (49:05).
• Unconscious Patients = Easier Profits: DST made it easier for doctors to “treat” (or abuse) with no patient resistance.

7. Ethical Breaches & Financial Grift (65:45–77:09)

• Bailey’s Ascent: After shadowing Dr. William Sargent in the UK—who advocated unconscious ECT—Bailey returned to Australia and set up his own deep sleep program (65:44).
• Professional Accolades & Immunity: Heroic reputation as a reformer and whistleblower protected him from suspicion—even as he exaggerated facility abuses for personal gain (70:25–71:54).
• Chelmsford Hospital:
  • Bailey became part-owner; financial arrangements incentivized keeping patients sedated for weeks (73:28–76:12).
  • Quote [Robert Evans, 74:46]:

    "Every new thing he can stick on—money in the bank."

• Committing Harm for Money: DST became not only a questionable therapy but the core of a predatory, for-profit enterprise. Patients and families faced staggering bills.

8. Outcomes and Legacy

• Sky-High Mortality:
  • DST was associated with deaths due to overdoses, pneumonia, blood clots, and withdrawal syndromes.
  • Many patients were not even suffering from severe psychiatric disorders.
• Culture of Silence: Peer acclaim and isolation of psychiatric practice allowed abuse and cover-ups for decades (68:39–70:23).
• Shocking Quote [Dr. William Sargent, 61:01]:

  "All sorts of treatment can be given while the patient is kept sleeping, including a variety of drugs and ECT, which together generally induce considerable memory loss... We may be seeing here a new, exciting beginning in psychiatry..."

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• [10:17, Gabe Dunn]:
  "That's the problem... the dark humor of my whole thing is I'm like, oh, tell me more. What did he use that's so bad?"

• [14:42, Gabe Dunn]:
  "Yeah, that'll put a chip on your shoulder in medical school for sure."

• [37:47, Robert Evans]:
  "Chloral hydrate is a real-ass drug...super addictive...can fuck you up."

• [44:38, Gabe Dunn]:
  "I think you should ask every time you’re prescribed something, has this killed 12% of the people?"

• [58:22, Robert Evans]:
  "I probably would have at this point, at that point in time, if I’d been dealing with fucking war trauma or something. I could see myself being like, yeah, man, knock me the fuck out."

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Key Timestamps

• 00:42: Gabe Dunn joins, expresses fan excitement.
• 06:47: Introduction to Dr. Harry Bailey and the origins of the episode.
• 11:29: Bailey’s family background and early financial hardship.
• 16:48: Bailey’s early medical achievements and awards.
• 27:23: History of Australian psychiatric care—“lunatic asylums.”
• 32:55: Introduction to deep sleep therapy as a treatment concept.
• 37:06: Chemical cocktails used in DST explained; inherent dangers.
• 43:44: Fatality rates in original DST studies; lack of consent.
• 49:05: Practical neglect—patients left unconscious for days.
• 61:01: Dr. Sargent’s textbook rationalizing hidden patient treatment under sedation.
• 65:45: Bailey returns to Australia inspired by DST; establishes research unit.
• 73:28: Bailey’s part-ownership and financial incentives at Chelmsford; systemic exploitation.
• 76:12: Families bankrupted by bills from unnecessary, deadly treatments.

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Tone & Language

• Sharp, irreverent, and often darkly comic— hosts do not shy from dry jokes about benzos, medical ethics, and their own anxieties.
• Critical of institutional authority, especially the psychiatric establishment’s historic failures and capacity for self-delusion or profiteering.
• Sympathetic to patients/victims; clear that many accepted DST out of desperation, not informed choice.
• Conversational, modern, non-clinical, with pop-culture references and friendly banter that underlines the horror with humor.

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Takeaways & Themes

• DST’s horror lies not just in its danger, but in the way institutional power and financial incentives enabled mass harm to desperate people.
• Medical fads and innovations, when untested and unchecked, can easily become deadly.
• Reputation as a “whistleblower” or “reformer” can be weaponized to shield far worse abuses.
• Underlying all: the tragic vulnerability of the mentally ill in a system that prioritizes profit and authority over ethical care.

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End of Part One. The story of Harry Bailey—and the horrifying legacy of deep sleep therapy—continues in Part Two.

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[Summary compiled in the spirit and tone of Behind the Bastards, accurately reflecting the episode’s structure, humor, and critical perspective. All quotes and timestamps are for reference within the episode as requested.]

Transcript

[Announcer]

Call Zone Media.

[Sponsor Voice 1]

Ah.

[Robert Evans]

Welcome back to behind the Bastards, a podcast about the very worst people in all of history. I'm Robert Evans, and those of you watching this will notice. Those of you listening shouldn't notice shit that I'm recording in a different location today. Instead of being in my dank basement in Portland, Oregon, I am in a house in the French Quarter of New Orleans. The city. City that never sleeps. The Big Apple. Anyway, here to not be in New Orleans with me, but here to podcast with me, the great Gabe Dunn. Welcome to the show, Gabe.

[Gabe Dunn]

Thank you. As I said before, I'm so excited. Probably too excited. I am a big fan of you guys. I would listen to you overnight at my warehouse job for hours and hours, and then I would get home and realize that I had only heard your voices for eight hours.

[Robert Evans]

Well, that actually happens to Sophie and I sometimes too.

[Announcer]

Yeah, I was like, sometimes when I made this, I said this a joke to somebody the other day, and then I realized it wasn't a joke. Sometimes I'll. I'll think things, but instead of it being in my voice, it's in Robert's.

[Gabe Dunn]

Wow, you've melted.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Yeah. And when I'm at a party and like, hey, Robert, do you want to shoot this mystery powder into, you know, your. Your veins? And I'll be like, I'll hear Sophie's voice saying, yes, Robert, I think you should. Don't test it. Don't test it at all. Don't take any precautions. Just inject anything you find into your body.

[Gabe Dunn]

That doesn't sound very well in New Orleans. That's gonna be cue in New Orleans.

[Robert Evans]

It is, it is. I mean, you know, Sophie's motto is Liv Moss. Taco Bell actually stole it from her. The lawsuit is ongoing. Wow. Yeah, I believe it. Low key would love things here at the top.

[Angela Yee]

I was gonna say, I would love

[Announcer]

to sue Taco Bell if somebody could

[Robert Evans]

give me a reason. Live Moss from you, but I think

[Announcer]

what Robert was saying is, Gabe, do you have any pluggables you want to plug up top here? I want to let the audience know who you are, because this is.

[Robert Evans]

You are.

[Announcer]

This is your first time on Bastards.

[Gabe Dunn]

It is. Believe me. I would have like, if I had been on it before, I would have been like, I can't come back because my life has peaked. I am a writer. I am an activist out of la, so I do a lot of anti ice on the ground stuff. My life got taken over by it in June when the National Guard invaded. So that. And then I do A fun time show called Best Gabe Ever, which is a spin off of Just Between Us, the show I've been doing for like 12 years. And then I have a substack called A Thousand Natural Shocks and a related podcast called A Thousand Natural Shocks that used to be called Bad With Money, but then the world I financial advice became even more irrelevant than it already was.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think the best thing to do now, I don't know. Try to have money. Let's do your best. Yeah.

[Gabe Dunn]

I mean, truly, I like tried to girl boss my way to whatever and then it just ended up being, I don't know, buried in the ground. Turn it into gold blocks. I don't know how to help you.

[Robert Evans]

You're talking about anti ice activism in la and it. I've been thinking about a surface level aspect of this for a while, which is in Seattle and then to a lesser extent in Oregon during the 2020 protests. A major symbol of the protests in those cities, especially Seattle, was the use of umbrellas. And it was kind of a significant thing because even though it rains all the time in the pnw, people don't use umbrellas here. Like, the fastest way to tell someone is not from here or and is not a resident is that they're using a fucking umbrella. And so there was all sorts of like graffiti in Seattle during, you know, the height of the protest that was like, we never needed umbrellas before because we never saw a real storm. And anyway, I think there's something. There's some. There's some good bit in like Los Angeles never had to deal with ice before because it's L. A. So now we have to figure out something.

[Gabe Dunn]

We also. Well, they. They have those signs that are like, California melts ice. You know.

[Robert Evans]

Right. It does. That's actually a major problem that we have here.

[Gabe Dunn]

Right. Yeah. And we also. I thought you were going to say because we've umbrellas to. To block stuff. And I think in California, people are buying umbrellas for the first time.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Not a city that had a lot of utility for umbrella owners previously.

[Gabe Dunn]

They go, where is car culture? And I like, where. Where do we even buy umbrellas? Is that. Is that a. Is that at the supermarket? Where do you get umbrellas?

[Announcer]

I grew up in la. I don't remember ever having an umbrella, so.

[Gabe Dunn]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

One umbrella, Michael, how much could it cost? $1,000.

[Gabe Dunn]

That's the people in Beverly Hills.

[Robert Evans]

Right, Right.

[Angela Yee]

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[Gabe Dunn]

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[Robert Evans]

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[Robert Evans]

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[Robert Evans]

So Gabe, it's probably time we get to the actual focus of our episode. This is a guy I don't think you have heard of. It's not a guy I had heard of before I started doing research on this. Love it. The episode title that I've got working is called the Real Doctor Sleep, which is the title entirely because I'm pretty sure Stephen King wrote a novel called Doctor Sleep. I don't know what it's about. I've certainly never read it. I don't think it has anything to do with our episode and it's a bad joke to make because I don't know anything about the Stephen King novel, but I did it and I can't think of it.

[Gabe Dunn]

I think the one his son wrote. I think his son wrote it.

[Robert Evans]

Maybe, maybe. But you know, that shit Stephen King,

[Gabe Dunn]

when you're a Nepo baby, you have to do exactly what your parents did.

[Robert Evans]

That said, I could also imagine a Stephen King Nepo baby just being Stephen King writing books for his kid and pretending they're his kid's book. He has time. He could put out five or six extra books a year. That's nothing. That's like three hours of work for Stephen King.

[Gabe Dunn]

You're imagining like you're imagining a kid, like you're imagining a 10 year old. And Stephen King's writing for him. But I'm like, okay, so he's a 45 year old man and Stephen King is still writing his books for him.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, of course. As long as he's alive, you know. Yeah, yeah. So obviously behind the Bastards is a podcast. I'm not complaining, but it takes a lot of work, right? These are generally eight to ten thousand word scripts every week. I average reading probably one to one and a half books a week, sometimes two books a week for doing like research for these episodes. And that's all year round, you know, 50 some weeks out of the year. The Epstein 4 parters that we just did thankfully didn't require me to go through books because that does take a lot of extra time. But I spent hours trawling through the Epstein archives and hours more reading everyone else's coverage of what's in there. Then I had to write like 16,000 words on the Motherfucker. So there's a lot to do, which is why I appreciate it whenever fans of the show are so good to suggest episode topics on the Mega thread and the behind the Bastards subreddit, because a lot of people will be like, you know, oh, I want to. When are we finally going to get the MAO episodes? Or you should do Stephen Miller and yeah, we'll get to all the big guys. Those guys do require a lot of work. What I really like from the episode suggestions is that people often help me find subjects who are really interesting and really fun to hear about. But they're also like kind of obscure and there's not a ton written about them, which means I can read everything written about them in the space of a couple of days, which is a lot lower research burden to me. And that's the kind of episode that we've got here. So I First off, I want to thank the admins of the subreddit for making the episode suggestion mega thread that I asked about during the Q and A episodes, because that came in handy. This week, somebody posted an unusually detailed thread user Captain Ravioli about an Australian quack doctor who killed a shitload of people by making them sleep themselves to death. We are talking about Australia's doctor Sleep. Gabe, have you heard of this story at all?

[Gabe Dunn]

I have not. But so darkly my first thought was like, how's that bad?

[Robert Evans]

How is that? It is. This is an interesting crack. Relatable. I fear both in that. First, it starts in a good place. It's not a quack medical treatment that starts quack. It starts with some real doctors and scientists being like, shit, this might help. This, like, might be a therapy that actually does something. And then it winds up not working. But this guy decides to make it his entire life and he gets a lot of people killed. But it is. When I, when I explain how this is supposed to work, you're going to be like, well, shit, I want to try that.

[Gabe Dunn]

That's the problem. And that's. And that's ultimately the dark humor of my whole thing is I'm like, oh, tell me more. What did he use that's so bad? That's so bad I'd have to be

[Robert Evans]

online for a week. Shit.

[Gabe Dunn]

Yeah, exactly. And how gentle is the sleep? Okay, I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

[Robert Evans]

Not. We will talk about all this, but first let's talk about our bastard. Let's introduce this motherfucker to the. The audience and to. And to the. Gabe. Harry Richard Bailey was born on October 29, 1922, in Picton, New South Wales, Australia. His hometown was a tiny place, and it still is today. There's only about 5,000 people who live in Picton now, so it was even smaller, one presumes, back then. And it was. It hadn't been. It had been like a town about a hundred years when he was born, just a little over. Picton was declared within the area of legal settlement in Australia in 1821. The town was named for a British army officer who died at Waterloo and had been, quote, feared for his irascible temperament. Which I just find funny that, like, there's this dead guy whose claim to fame was he was a real asshole. Let's name a town in Australia after him.

[Gabe Dunn]

Is that angry? Like, he was angry?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, he's a dick. He's mean. Yeah, he's Henri.

[Gabe Dunn]

Well, cussing, that might be a good quality to have for that kind of person.

[Robert Evans]

I don't know. I can see being ornery being a benefit as a Napoleonic era military officer. Although again, he dies at Waterloo, so he can't have been that good, right? I like soldiers who don't die at Waterloo.

[Gabe Dunn]

Yeah. I'm such a flouncy little gay boy that I'm like, I don't know what qualities would be good for a soldier at Waterloo.

[Robert Evans]

Don't sell yourself short, Gabe. I believe if you were taken back in time to Waterloo, you could kill a lot of Frenchmen or Englishmen, depending on, you know, where you stand. Or Austrians, you know. I believe in you.

[Gabe Dunn]

I think I'm just off to the side, like, does anyone want chips?

[Robert Evans]

I think I'm trying to stay away from the cannons, but you guys are just like walking at guns. No, I don't want to walk towards a gun. That's a horrible idea.

[Gabe Dunn]

I'll be here with Juice when you come back.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I'm going to introduce the concept of ducking behind cover to the Napoleonic era militaries and then get executed.

[Gabe Dunn]

This is my problem, like, with like confronting ICE and DHS where I am in la, because my whole thing is like, they'll just come do their little army thing and. And I'm like, my thought, I'm so autistic that I'm like, you don't have to do this. Does any of us have to do this? None of us have to do this. I feel like. I feel being like, guys, I think we should just go home. Oh, like the general from the Dispatch song.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly like that. So anyway, that was a digression. Harry Bailey was the eldest child of his parents. Jack Bailey, a railway night watchman and eventually station master, and Ruth Smith, a homemaker. Smith was his mom's maiden name at least obviously she's Ruth Bailey. I presume by the time that Harry is born, she and her husband came up, like, grew up in the same general area in New South Wales, and they'd known each other most of their lives. They send Harry to a private Christian school for his basic education. And unfortunately, this is one of those bastards where we just have very little about their childhood and early life. Like basically nothing. We don't have any quotes that he was an ambitious boy. We don't even have any. Anyone talking about the fact that he was like a good student, which I presume he was given. You know, what he does with the rest of his life. So we're just gonna have to move forward knowing this guy's early backstory is kind of a black box to the world. The only hint of any kind of color or detail about his day to day life as a child came from this entry, came from his entry in the Australian Encyclopedia of Biography. Quote, harry enrolled in science at the University of Sydney in 1940. Lacking money, he did not finish the course and found work as a pharmacist's assistant. And in fact, there seem to have been, I think there's two times where Harry is trying to go through a degree program and has to drop out for financial reasons. And from that I think it's reasonable to infer he comes from a kind of poor family, you know, maybe probably not unusually poor for Pickton, probably as poor as basically everybody else in Pickton. But he doesn't have money growing up. Right. Like, you don't have to drop out of school twice to work full time if your family's flush, generally speaking, yeah,

[Gabe Dunn]

that'll put a chip on your shoulder in medical school for sure.

[Robert Evans]

And it, I think, is he is going to really follow the money his entire career in some very evil ways. And I think maybe that's kind of where it starts. Like, he grows up really poor and that is kind of. That seems to be his primary motivation in life is I want to make money even more than the medical stuff he's talking about doing. He wants to get paid. Right.

[Gabe Dunn]

I feel like that happens to men. Like, men are poor and then they grow up and they're like, I got to be evil about it.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. I mean, I get it because, like, you know, I have like, as in my career, I have not done what a lot of other reporters do and focused on like getting staff jobs. I focused on my reporting is usually been like my secondary job. And I did something else in comedy and entertainment because it paid better because I did grow up, like, poor and with a lot of economic anxiety. And so as a kid, there was this. Growing up, there was this, like, I have to at least I don't want to like, deal with the fear that my parents dealt with their whole childhood. I want to be more stable than they were. But Harry, I think it becomes like a. I have to get rich at all costs and it doesn't matter whatever I have to do to people to do it as opposed to maybe I won't work full time for a newspaper because that doesn't seem like a future forward position.

[Gabe Dunn]

Right? Yes. Chip on your shoulder. Entitlement. It starts like that.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Yep, yep. So, and this is reading between the lines a bit by Me here. So take it with a grain of salt. But I he the fact that he is, he's really committed to trying to get a scientific degree, right. Like a medical degree eventually. Because he tries a couple of times, he's to drop out and save up money. I see this as evidence that we've got this kind of. We've got a smart, determined, broke ass boy who's desperate to make something of himself. Right. Like he really has to try.

[Gabe Dunn]

Yeah, yeah. I don't, I don't want to say that that's. I think that that's a really admirable thing.

[Robert Evans]

It can go well or badly.

[Gabe Dunn]

I will maintain my admiration toward him until inevitably something happens.

[Robert Evans]

And he is kind of admirable at the start here. At least it seems that way. Yeah. To continue with a quote from the Australian Encyclopedia of biography. On January 19, 1945, at the Registrar General's Office, Sydney, he married Marjorie Jocelyn Noonan, a cashier. He studied medicine at the University of Sydney and got his MB and ms, winning the Norton Manning Memorial Prize for Psychiatry and the Major Ian Vickery Prize for Pediatrics. So again, not a lot of color here, but he does finally get to graduate. And as soon as he starts working as a psychiatrist, because obviously you're doing your internship and stuff, he's like winning awards very quickly. He is in very short order within a few years of starting, he is an award winning psychiatrist.

[Gabe Dunn]

He's a psychiatrist for children.

[Robert Evans]

Do we know child psychiatry is a major area of his interest? Yes, he is specializing in pediatrics for a period of time. Yeah. Well, so yeah, at this point, by the time he's in his early 20s, he's got his, his medical degree, he's won some awards, he's married a working class girl who we presume kind of busted her ass the whole time he was in school to help make his dream come true. And then it does. He seems to be doing really, really well. Right. Everything's coming up Bailey. Now, I will say the fact that because when he's working on his medical degree, he did not initially want to be a psychiatrist. It's a choice he makes kind of late in his scholastic history. And there's a reason for this. By the 1950s, and this is true in Australia, but it's true all throughout, like the Western world. Psychiatry is not a super popular field for doctors. Right. And because of this, in many parts of the west, including Australia, there are not enough psychiatrists to meet the need. It's a very underserved job. Right. Just like I think a good example today there's not nearly enough anesthesiologists. Right. Like if you're a, if you're a nurse, anesthesiologist or a fucking doctor, you are going to be working as much as you want to work because there is no limit to the amount of need for you.

[Gabe Dunn]

Sure. And that's not a super important part of the surgery or anything?

[Robert Evans]

No, not. Of course not.

[Gabe Dunn]

It's huge. It's one of the most important parts.

[Robert Evans]

And as a result, if you are getting into a medical field today and it's something that you have an inclination for, you make a lot of money as an anesthesiologist. And the same thing is kind of true of a psych in the 50s, right. There's not enough of them to meet the need. There's a lot of demand. And so Bailey, being this kind of poor kid looking for a place to make his mark, would both say, well, it'll be easy to get work as a psychiatrist. Like this is a field where they need more people, but also it's a new field and there's a lot of shit being discovered every day I have a chance to get in kind of on, not on the ground floor, but pretty close and make a name for myself because there's less of us. So if I'm good at this, it'll be a lot easier for me to stand out than if I were to become, you know, a heart surgeon or whatever.

[Gabe Dunn]

And the state of mental health is not what we want it to be.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, we'll talk about that too. But a big part of why he becomes a psychiatrist is psychiatry is what you want to get into if you're looking to make your mark in the medical field and you want the easiest time of it possible. So after graduate, getting out and getting his degree, our boy spends a year interning at the Prince Alfred Hospital and then gets a full time regular gig at the Broughton Hall Psychiatric Clinic in Leichardt, which is a suburb of Sydney that I'm sure I have mispronounced.

[Announcer]

And we have a giant Australian audience, so they will let you know.

[Robert Evans]

Crikey. Hey, go it wrong. That's my Australian. That's going to piss him off more.

[Announcer]

Or no.

[Robert Evans]

Sorry guys, that was, that was, that was uncalled for. That was uncalled for.

[Gabe Dunn]

This is like when you spell something wrong on purpose in a TikTok so that you get a bunch of engagement. You're doing this on purpose. So the more comments, the more emails, the more popular the show is.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I've discovered something with Australians which is that they respond really well to nagging. So I'm just kind of doing that to build our audience over there.

[Announcer]

Well, I just want to give a spoiler that Robert's actually never intentionally mispronounced a single word a day in his life and never.

[Robert Evans]

I've never mispronounced the word. I'd argue.

[Announcer]

Yeah, he's never mispronounced a word and it, and if it happened, it was, the job's done. What do you want from him?

[Gabe Dunn]

Yeah, flood the emails, let us know.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, please don't let them know.

[Gabe Dunn]

I won't read the emails. I don't care.

[Robert Evans]

So he starts working at this clinic in a suburb of Sydney and he seems to be really good at it. Opportunities start flooding in for him at this point and he's so in demand that in the fall of 1954 he begins a 15 month tour for the World Health Organization, which is going to take him all across Canada, the United States and Europe.

[Announcer]

Remember the World Health Organization, everyone.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. This is, I, I mean he's, he doesn't do anything bad while he's with the who, but his time with the WHO does kind of lead to something bad. It's not really the who's fault, but part of what this is is he's a young, up and cominging doctor and the WHO is having him shadow prominent psychiatrists in other countries. Right. To see their methods, to work with them. You know, it's a good professional development thing. And he finds himself as he's meeting these guys and he's seeing these new cutting edge treatments they're working on. He finds himself gravitating to these like sexy new medications and electronic devices that are being used in therapy, like electroconvulsive therapy. He's really drawn to. Right. And that is, that's a real therapy. People use it, it's used today on, for example, people with like epilepsy. But at this time people are just kind of being electrocuted because they figure maybe that'll shock, shake them out of it. Right.

[Gabe Dunn]

And it did. Right.

[Robert Evans]

It doesn't, it's not great. It's wildly overprescribed at this period of time in a way that is like often just torture. And he's also really interested. We're starting by the 50s. You have to remember drugs aren't great until like the 1900s is really when we start to figure out drugs. Drugs and especially we start to figure out sedatives largely like benzos. Like benzos have hit the, have hit the floor. And doctors are like a pill that makes my patient just go away so I can do whatever I need to do on them and they won't say anything. Amazing. Right? And he loves sedatives. He finds himself like fascinated by benzos in particular.

[Announcer]

Honey, me too. Like what?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Who doesn't love a good benzo? Am I right?

[Gabe Dunn]

Yeah, they're good. But he's not taking them himself. Right. He's just over prescribing them or loves

[Robert Evans]

to prescribe them at this point. Yeah, he, he just loves to prescribe them. And it's important. We would say over. But at the time, nobody's calling this over prescription. I don't even know that he's prescribing more than is normal for the day at this point in time. Because doctors love giving out benzos in the 50s.

[Gabe Dunn]

Sure do. Sure do.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Gabe Dunn]

That's why boomers are the way they are. Maybe.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Like 80% of medicine is benzodiazepine and fucking cigarettes. Like that's most of modern medicine in the business.

[Gabe Dunn]

Bring it back.

[Robert Evans]

We should return. We should return.

[Gabe Dunn]

That was the gold. What was? The golden era.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. God almighty. Speaking of gold, you know who might sell you benzos, you know, under the table if you're nice to them?

[Gabe Dunn]

Is it the products and services?

[Robert Evans]

That's right. That's right. We might be sponsored by a guy down the street who will sell you benzos. Or there might just be a guy down the street who will sell you benzos. And if so, I got to tell you that's just going to be straight fentanyl, folks. Test your shit. You know, test your shit. Unless it's from our sponsors.

[Announcer]

Test your shit.

[Robert Evans]

Do whatever our sponsors give you or anyone who says they're one of our sponsors. Anyway, here's ads.

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[Robert Evans]

It's March.

[Sponsor Voice 1]

That means things are finally starting to

[Robert Evans]

warm up and maybe get a little bit brighter outside depending on where you live.

[Sponsor Voice 1]

And it also means International Women's Day is coming up. This is a great time to celebrate the women in your life and celebrate the progress that women have made all over the world. We want to remind women how much they matter and that therapy offers a place for them to take care of themselves. In a way they deserve better help. Therapists work according to a strict code of conduct and are fully licensed in the United States. BetterHelp does the initial matching work for you so you can focus on your therapy goals. A short questionnaire helps identify your needs and preferences and their 12 plus years of experience and industry leading match fulfillment rate means they typically get it right the first time. If you aren't happy with your match, switch to a different therapist at any time from their tailored recommendations. With over 30,000 therapists, BetterHelp is the world's largest online therapy platform. Your emotional well being matters. Find support and feel lighter in therapy. Sign up and get 10% [e-mail] behind that's betterhelp.com behind.

[Robert Evans]

Welcome back to the paradcoost. So I don't know why I said it that way.

[Announcer]

What's happening here? New Orleans is getting to you.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, that's gotta be the Nolans. So let's take a step back here. We've just been talking about Dr. Bailey's life up to the kind of birth of his career and his tour with the who. He's trying out new drugs. He's learning how to electrocute people, meeting fun doctors all over the world. So let's take a step back and let's talk a little bit about the state of psychiatry and care for the mentally ill at this point, both in the west in general and in Australia in specific. Primarily in Australia specifically. So the first mental health institution in Australia was the Australian Lunatic Asylum in Castle Hill in New South Wales, which they used to just call them. That used to just call lunatic asylum crazy.

[Gabe Dunn]

That's what I call my apartment.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Yeah. So that was established in 1811. And I probably don't have to tell you it wasn't a nice place. The lunatic Asylum in 1811, attendants had no training. Treatment was not a condition. There's no thought that you treat people. This is just a warehouse to stick crazy people until they die. Right. There's a lot of violence, a lot of brutality, a lot of sickness. It's gross. And it gets really crowded really quickly because whenever someone doesn't, like, fit in and isn't able to handle life on their own, they're just kind of thrown in here. Right. A lot of these people are just not even folks that we would say have mental illnesses. Often it's just like, oh, poor guy, Throw him in the lunatic asylum. He's sleeping in the street. Something like that.

[Gabe Dunn]

I had a boyfriend who was 6 foot 7, and he would sometimes be like, oh, what if about past lives for us. And I was like, I would be in an asylum for being, like, having depression and being gay. And you're six foot seven. You would be in a freak show. This is. There's no romanticizing this.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, you would. You would be in a freak show, or you would be in, like, one of those Austrian military units where they only hired tall guys to make the king look cooler.

[Gabe Dunn]

We're not having the Pleasantville experience.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Announcer]

I would have been burned at the stake 100%.

[Robert Evans]

So that that first lunatic asylum gets so crowded that in 1837, a new asylum has to be built. And more follow a decade later. Per an article on the Chelmsford scandal blog, Quote, mentally ill patients were commonly transferred from jails to these asylums upon their opening. This gives clues as to the attitudes held towards those afflicted with mental illness. It was only in 1867 that an act of parliament made it mandatory for mentally impaired persons to be housed in asylums rather than prisons. This grouped together the mentally retarded or disabled and the mentally ill. In 1900, these categories were made distinct and the patients separated. Those are not all terms we use now, but this is what they're calling them at the time. Right?

[Gabe Dunn]

They're bringing it back.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, they're bringing it back, yeah. Fucking streamers are. So things do start to get better. But even in asylums, where the superintendents are promoting, like, a philosophy of humane care and actually trying to treat people, there are still massive practical issues of there's never enough budget for these places to make them very nice. They're always overcrowded, it's hard to get supplies. And this leads to what's called a custodial approach. So asylums are regulating and housing people and they're acknowledged that they need treatment, but they're not providing treatment. The only thing that they use to control patients, they've got like, violence and straitjackets. Right. They're basically like beating them and to comply them and putting them in straitjackets. The situation improves gradually and unevenly. By the time Dr. Bailey is in college, the focus had shifted to treating the illnesses people presented. And that's now increasingly a part of the actual, like, asylum experience is now we're still, you know, pretty unpleasant places, but we're actually trying to treat you much more than we were before. And treatment in this case still does just often mean you're pounding people's brains with drugs, though, Right. There's nothing you're not necessarily getting, like, useful therapy. They've figured out tranquilizers by this point, which have replaced straight jackets. They're like, look, we're not using straight jackets as much because we're just doping them up to the point where they can't move most of the time.

[Gabe Dunn]

Would the idea be to reintegrate them into society?

[Robert Evans]

Yes. That has finally broken through. And by the 50s and 60s, nurses and attendants, theoretically at least, consider themselves to be working to treat and improve the conditions of their patients, not just to store them. People are often still just stored their whole lives, but there's at least an understanding that you're supposed to try to help these people.

[Gabe Dunn]

You know, you send your wife because she's depressed, they put her on benzos, send her back home, now she just washes the dishes like a zombie. We did it.

[Robert Evans]

Exactly, Exactly. And honestly, theoretical 50s housewife, send me your benzos, please. I will put them to good use. So. Nah, it's a joke. I would never. You'd never do something like that. Now, unfortunately, this is a primitive time still for mental health care treatment. And many doctors find themselves overwhelmed by the difficulty and horror of dealing with certain illnesses. This makes them desperate to find chemical solutions that are fast and simple. And this brings us to deep sleep therapy. The basic idea here is that for some mental illnesses, maybe you'll help a person if you just knock them out with drugs and keep them unconscious in something that's kind of adjacent to an artificially maintained coma for long periods of time. Right.

[Gabe Dunn]

How long?

[Robert Evans]

Great question. You know, we'll talk about that. But it's anywhere from in some cases, because one thing they're using this for where it might actually kind of help. I mean, the drugs are probably still making a net negative because of how much they're pumping. But like, people who are insomniacs, they'll be like, okay, well, I can knock you out for 12 hours, then you catch up on your sleep. Right. And that's initially a lot of the first tries. They are just trying for like a day, but they start trying it for, like a couple of days at a time, A week at a time, two weeks. Like, they'll do various versions of that as they explore it more. The first psychiatrist to try this, as far as we can tell, was a scotsman named Neil McLeod. And he experimented with knocking people out for long periods of time as a treatment for schizophrenia. Right. His attitude is.

[Gabe Dunn]

I was going to say, I mean,

[Robert Evans]

it resets a mania.

[Gabe Dunn]

Bipolar disorder. Mania could be good. It could be good for that.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, sleep it. Sleep it off. Right? You can see why people would think this. He's not. McCloud is not a bad guy for wondering, fuck this. Maybe if I just help, let this person sleep for like five days, they'll wake up better. I don't know. It's worth a try at the time. Right now, as you probably know, all sleep is not created equal. You got your light sleep or slow wave sleep, and you've got deep sleep, and you've got rapid eye movement sleep, better known as REM sleep, Because when you enter the REM stage of sleep, the human subconscious naturally generates the image and voice of Michael Stipe. We all experience this, right? That's why they call it REM sleep.

[Gabe Dunn]

You got me. I was not expecting it.

[Robert Evans]

I'll always make an RM joke, you know, it's a band. It's a band. They're definitely a band. Each stage of sleep has different effects and does different things for you. By this point, kind of the mid 20th century, scientists had started to understand that deep sleep is particularly important for Healing, Right. Like from physical ailments and stuff, you know, like that's what you're like you're supposed to sleep if you're sick, you know, to get more sleep because your body does actually like heal and kind of restores itself during the sleep process. And deep sleep is really important for that. Which is why if you don't get enough deep sleep, your health starts to suffer. Deep sleep also plays a role in memory consolidation. Right. Your brain does a lot of its, like sorting and filing memories, I guess, during the deep sleep stage. I want to quote from an article by the editorial [e-mail] Proponents of deep sleep therapy hypothesized that by artificially extending the deep sleep phase, they could enhance its restorative properties and provide therapeutic benefits for individuals suffering from mental health disorders. The theory suggested that prolonged deep sleep could allow the brain to reset neural pathways, reduce stress, and alleviate symptoms of various psychiatric conditions. However, it's important to note that the mechanisms proposed by deep sleep therapy advocates were largely speculative and lacked robust scientific evidence. The human sleep cycle is a complex and finely tuned process and artificially manipulating it for extended periods of time carries significant risks and potential consequences.

[Gabe Dunn]

Yes, I was gonna say the opposite. The opposite of that is you're sleeping so much that you have a fog and you're, you're like your brain is actually working worse.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. Like, and that's the thing with depression, right? You want to sleep all the time. Or it's one thing that can happen with depression. People tend to want to just knock themselves out for long periods of time.

[Gabe Dunn]

Yeah. You lose track of. Of you lose track of the days, you lose track of like your own memories. What's a dream, what's not. You become Leonardo DiCaprio in Inception.

[Robert Evans]

Sure. Yep. But I think you also, I feel like I get, I think you get why a well meaning doctor or a patient would feel like, oh, yeah, that makes sense. I see why that would help. Yeah, like, sure, you know, let's give it a try.

[Gabe Dunn]

Well, it's like you're depressed or you're stressed out. All right. They do give you still a benzo.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, if you're lucky. So let's talk about how deep sleep therapy works. Once a patient was identified as a good candidate for this treatment, they'd be administered a heavy dose of various sedatives described by the people at Neuro Launch as a cocktail of barbiturates and other sedative drugs, which, if I'm honest, I'm lucky. I know it sounds pretty great, right?

[Gabe Dunn]

This is the worst two people to do this episode.

[Robert Evans]

I know, I know. As I was reading that, as I was like, doing my research, I kept being like, fuck, I do want to try this. This sounds rad. So the cocktail has three major ingredients. Chloral hydrate is a big one. This is a chemical that had come out of Germany as a popular sedative in the 1870s. And it works very well, but it's also extraordinarily dangerous. Just being close to the vapors of chloral hydrate can fuck you up. It's also super addictive, which is a problem because if you're keeping someone unconscious and giving them this every day for two weeks, their body can wake. They can wake up addicted to chloral hydraulic right. This is not ideal. Yeah.

[Gabe Dunn]

Holy shit.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. It's also. And it also causes lots of physical problems for patients, including because it's a central nervous system depressant, heart and lung failure. So people who die pretty easily overdosing on this stuff.

[Gabe Dunn]

Oh, my God. That's so much more dangerous than I thought.

[Robert Evans]

It's a. It's a serious drug. Chloral hydrate is a real ass drug. And it's not the only one in this cocktail, no matter how much are you taking.

[Gabe Dunn]

Is it like a tincture or you're taking.

[Robert Evans]

Great question. Great question. It varies on the doctor. It varies on the doctor. And sometimes it is administered via iv, sometimes it's administered via like a series of pills. Right. Usually they're taking pills to put them down initially, and then an IV kind of keeps them topped up during the period of time where they're unconscious. Right. Another major ingredient of the cocktail is amobarbital, which is a barbiturate derivative that was known as a street drug under the name Blue Heavens and. Sounds awesome. It is also super addictive and causes horrific withdrawals that can straight up kill you. Benzos are one of those things. If you are addicted to benzos and you stop, it can just kill your ass. Like the withdrawal can. Like you have to. You have to taper off, often with medical assistance. It can be a real problem.

[Gabe Dunn]

Blue Heaven.

[Robert Evans]

Blue Heavens is the street name for ammo. Barbital. And yeah. Another major part of the cocktail was sodium theopental, which is used as a general anesthetic, but is better known as one of the more popular truth serums. Yeah, exactly.

[Gabe Dunn]

Yeah, I knew that. I knew. Truth serum.

[Robert Evans]

Now it's also a rapid onset barbiturate, like amobarbital. So in addition to. This is like chloral hydrate and 2 rapid onset barbiturates is what you're taking together in this cocktail.

[Gabe Dunn]

Your heart and lungs are failing you.

[Robert Evans]

Absolutely. You ain't breathing shit.

[Gabe Dunn]

Don't shut your mind on something called Blue heaven and you won't stop telling your secrets.

[Robert Evans]

Exactly. Perfect.

[Gabe Dunn]

Wow, that's a Friday night, baby.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, it sounds like a pretty nice Friday night if you've never been on like a. If you've never taken like a heavy dose of Xanax or something. When I was a kid, and by a kid I mean like 20 years old, the person I was seeing at the time gave me what we both thought, we each took a quarter bar of Xanax. This is my first time taking Xanax. She'd been taking it for a while, but it was street zanz. And what we got was, thankfully this was not the era of fentanyl yet. It was definitely alprazolam that was pressed into that street pill. But when you get a street pill, sometimes it's the strength of a normal pill, sometimes it's much stronger. So I took a quarter bar, which should just kind of mellow you out, and I took it. And I remember stepping down the street out in front of my house and then I came to myself sitting on my couch 30 hours later without any memories of the intervening period whatsoever.

[Gabe Dunn]

I would do that. It would totally work.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, it totally works.

[Gabe Dunn]

I don't even know how I got. Were you living in New York? Where were you?

[Robert Evans]

No, I was in Texas at this point in time.

[Gabe Dunn]

Oh, Texas, okay.

[Robert Evans]

But you've had some hot, hot zans too, I'm guessing. And that's part of why, especially in the mid aughts, there were a lot of deaths due to xands that had fint in them or that were just way too hot. Because if you're, I mean, Xanax is not a great drug. You don't want to. If you can kill, kill yourself. Mixing it with alcohol, it's really dangerous to mix with like fucking coke or whatever, especially in high quantities. I mean, if you have no idea how strong the pill you're taking is, like, that's particularly dangerous. But I, I bring this up to be like, that's how powerful this shit is. You can take a pill the size of the end of your finger and you're just gone for a full 24 hours or more. Right. And these people are taking functioning way

[Gabe Dunn]

more out and about.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is why they're throwing in the chloral hydrate. And they don't want you functioning for shit during this.

[Gabe Dunn]

I took. I was taking Ambien for a while and I stopped because I would. I would go to bed wearing one thing, take the Ambien, and then wake up in different clothes in a different part of my house.

[Robert Evans]

Mm. Yeah, it's fucking wild stuff.

[Gabe Dunn]

I was like, what is a food would be missing? I'd be like, I guess I ate something.

[Robert Evans]

I must have done something. Yeah.

[Gabe Dunn]

Who knows?

[Robert Evans]

Who knows?

[Gabe Dunn]

One time I looked in my Google searches and I had Googled scary horses.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. I have a couple of notebooks from times like that in my life where it'd be like, oh, I had a really great idea for an article while I was fucked up. And I'll look over and it'll just say something like, completely incomprehensible, or I'll just not be able to read my own handwriting. It's like, thanks, drug me. Like, really? The idea of the century there, the word purple and then four paragraphs of unreadable squiggles around it. I'll turn this into a book immediately.

[Gabe Dunn]

Brilliant. That's like that thing where they're like, artists have to be like, fucked up to be. I'm like, I don't know about that.

[Robert Evans]

Nah, nah, nah. There's certainly limits to when it's. How much of that can be handy or useful. So. One of the first physicians to explore the use of deep sleep therapy, or dst, was Jacob Klasey. He was a Swiss psychiatrist who seems to have had to deal with the pharmaceutical manufacturer Roche because he only used their barbiturates in his cocktail. Per an article on the website Mad in America by Dr. Philip Hickey, quote in Claesy's first publication on this matter, he acknowledged that three of the 26 patients had died during the study due to bronchopneumonia or cardiac hemorrhages. This is about 12%. Nevertheless, the method achieved some popularity in the 50s and 60s and was used by William Sargent in the UK and Donald Cameron in Canada, both considered eminent psychiatrists. So the first guy to try deep sleep therapy kills 12% of the 26 patients that he.

[Gabe Dunn]

This is because people didn't talk to each other.

[Robert Evans]

I mean, no, unfortunately not. They're reading this. Sargent and Cameron find out about this because they read this study where he kills 12% of his patients and are like, I gotta. I gotta get on that. I gotta try.

[Gabe Dunn]

The people don't know about that.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The people taking agreeing to the treatment are not being told. So yeah. In the first study we did on this, it killed three of the 26 people in it. You wanna, you wanna roll those dice?

[Gabe Dunn]

Yeah, exactly.

[Robert Evans]

And this is part of the problem is it is the standard to have consent in this period of time. But what they. What consent means in the 50s and 60s is not what we would call consent today. Cause a big thing. Doctors. There's a bit. Doctors don't like explaining stuff to patients in this period of time. I'm not. They don't always do it now like

[Announcer]

explaining stuff to patients now at all.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Announcer]

This is like it.

[Robert Evans]

But it's considered. It's like offensive to a lot of doctors that a patient would have any input at all.

[Announcer]

Oh, it's like how dare you question my expertise? I'm a doctor.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah.

[Gabe Dunn]

Not, not to victim blame, but I think you should ask every time you're prescribed something, has this killed 12% of the people?

[Robert Evans]

Does this kill 12% of the people who do it?

[Gabe Dunn]

And if they say no and they really killed 13%, that's on you.

[Robert Evans]

That's on you.

[Announcer]

Solid question to ask.

[Robert Evans]

One of the problems here because these are doctors often working in like public health for the mentally ill in the 60s. One of the issues is that a lot of the people they're being sent are not compos mentis anyway. So they're not able and often not asked to consent to anything. But there's certainly these guys attitude. No one outside is going to come in and say like wait, you're giving all these guys a treatment that might kill 12% of them. Everyone else who is in the government is in like the local who should be a watchdog for this is just like we want these people off the streets. Keep them away from where anyone will watch them. I don't care. You're a doctor, do whatever to them. Fuck it. Right. That's not all because obviously regular people who are out in society and stuff and not institutionalized get these therapies too. But a lot of them are institutionalized people and just nobody gives a fuck what happens to them. Right. That's why they're doing shit like this. Yeah. Still now. So the amount of time you're kept under during deep sleep therapy varies pretty widely. The vast majority of therapeutic treatments in Europe seem to have been a day or less. It's very uncommon for the credible doctors doing this at the time to keep people under for more than a day at a time. But some, some researchers experiment with extended periods of time up to like two weeks long per neurological. Yeah. Oh, and it gets just. Just you wait, my friend. Yeah, two weeks.

[Gabe Dunn]

That's a coma. Legally, that's.

[Robert Evans]

That's a coma. That's a fucking coma. Per neurolaunch.com's during this time, patients were kept in a state of unconsciousness with brief periods of wakefulness for feeding and basic care. Monitoring and safety protocols were essential components of deep sleep therapy. Given the risks associated with prolonged sedation. Medical staff closely monitor patients vital signs, including heart rate, blood pressure and respiratory function. Intravenous fluids and nutritional support were provided to maintain hydration and prevent malnutrition. Sophie's gonna put a picture up. You can see on the video version. If not, I will describe it.

[Gabe Dunn]

Oh my God.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, you're seeing a feeding of a patient here. So you've got a man in a hospital bed, a 60s looking one unconscious. There's a doctor or an orderly, I can't really tell standing behind him who's got his. He's holding his head. He's got a hand on either side of this guy's head to keep his head straight. And then there is, you know, like a beer bong.

[Gabe Dunn]

Oh, there's a funnel food into him.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, it's like what they're using is like a funnel attached to a tube that goes into his nose. And this guy's just pouring from. Honestly, what looks like a carafe of coffee. I'm sure it's some like nutritional supplement or just hydration or whatever, but it looks like he's just pouring coffee into this guy's nose.

[Gabe Dunn]

Me in the morning, trying to get up. Two people have to nose feed me coffee.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, you got a nose feed. I can't, I can't get out of bed until I've had an entire liter of coffee poured up my nose. You know, Sophie will tell you that's the only way I work in the morning.

[Gabe Dunn]

True, right. And then, and then as soon as they're done, my eyes pop open and I pop out of bed like, don't wake daddy.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, thank you for the don't wake daddy reference. That's really going. That's going. That's going to be really popular with the chunk of our audience whose knees are starting to fail.

[Gabe Dunn]

Oh, and REM isn't. Oh, and Michael Stipe isn't.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, it's okay. The people who would most get the Michael Stipe joke can't hear anymore. They're Gen X, Robert. Like their bodies failed them long ago.

[Announcer]

Stop insulting the people that support us.

[Robert Evans]

I know. I Love you guys. Gen X listeners.

[Announcer]

Know I love you, Gen X listeners.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. So what I just described is how deep sleep therapy was supposed to work. The fact that you are supposed to generally be under for no longer than a day at a time. And you're woken regularly to be fed, to be, like, moved, to be, like, you should be walked around to help prevent bed sores. But you know what, that takes work. You gotta have people who, like, are keeping track of everybody's schedule and, like, waking guys and putting them back down and moving them around and cleaning them. And if you really want to cut costs, why not just keep them knocked out instead and just have them be unconscious the whole time.

[Gabe Dunn]

Save money, stand you up and, like, weekend at Bernies you around.

[Robert Evans]

Cheaper is better. Cheaper is better.

[Gabe Dunn]

They just have one guy that's kind of making you walk.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I mean, usually they just don't do that. Usually just leave you unconscious. That it comes increasingly in big facilities, right, in psychiatric hospitals because they often don't have adequate staff, too. But they are supposed to. And I should note, even though the good places they are waking you up regularly, moving around, feeding you, you don't remember any of that. You're still benzoed out the whole time. So for you, it's still like you were just gone for two weeks or whatever. So the most common early treatment deep sleep therapy is used for is schizophrenia, but it's also used for severe depression and, as I said, insomnia. Over time, doctors explore treating anxiety disorders and addiction with this therapy as well. And you can see the logic here. Oh, somebody wants to sober up from whatever, knock them out for a few days until they detox. Right, Great idea. Now, there's some downsides to this. There's some reasons why this is not as good an idea as it seems, which is that withdrawal from drugs you are physically addicted to often carries physiological effects. And most withdrawals are not fatal. Right, but it can become fatal when someone is going through withdrawal from a drug they're physically addicted to, and you deeply depress their central nervous system for days on end with huge doses of benzos. So people die Sometimes.

[Gabe Dunn]

Why? Wait, what do you mean? How?

[Robert Evans]

Like they stop breathing. It's a CNS depressor. Yeah. So they just stop. They just. I mean, there's other ways this kills them, too, but a lot of times they just stop fucking breathing or their heart just stops. Right? There are other ways this cocktail kills people. Some people are just allergic, right. And have bad reactions. Or some people are more vulnerable to benzos than Others. And so a dose that's okay for one is dangerous or fatal for another person. Right. And not always being as careful as they should be. Right. Allergies. And again, oftentimes this is being done in facilities where they're trying to deal with as many people as quickly as possible and they're not overly concerned with stuff like, you know, safety as much as they should be. Right. That said, physicians love this because psychiatrists love this because it gives what certain kinds of psychiatrists. Because obviously you get your Freudian types who it's all about talk therapy, but they're a psychiatrist whose whole thing is drugs. Drugs give them something to. That's all that matters, is dose them. Right. There's a place for aspects of that, obviously. But when you take it to the too far extent, you're like, I just don't want to deal. I don't want to talk to the patient at all. I don't want to deal with their shit. I want them knocked out. And then I can give them whatever medication I think will help them because I'm the doctor and it's only my opinion that matters. Right? That is how a lot of these guys think.

[Gabe Dunn]

Were these people brought in by their families or like, so if they died, would somebody care?

[Robert Evans]

Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Some of these people are basically wards of the state or brought in by the state. They're arrested or something. They're sentenced to this place because they're. They're non compos mentis, but they've committed a crime. But a lot of people take themselves in because, like, I can't sleep, I'm depressed, I'm suffering horrible anxiety. Right. So it's a mix of ways people get into this, but a lot of doctors are very enthusiastic about it. And in terms of. When you're talking about the practitioners who are advocates of this therapy, they will tell patients that they can get relief from their symptoms after just a couple of weeks, that they won't even be awake for. Instead of. Basically they're saying, look, you can go to the. The Freudian and maybe it'll help you, but it'll take years of therapy or knock your problem out. In two weeks, you're not even awake.

[Announcer]

Wow.

[Gabe Dunn]

You know, that's those. They have an ad on Santa Monica and Coanga for whatever that thing is that's like the neuro link or something

[Robert Evans]

where it's like, yeah, yeah.

[Gabe Dunn]

It literally says, like, don't be like, depression gone. I'm like, that can't be right.

[Robert Evans]

And I'm always You should, and you should always be super on guard whenever anyone is talking about like a serious mental health problem. Like, and this just knocks it out. Has that ever happened?

[Gabe Dunn]

Mental health?

[Robert Evans]

There's some stuff like the thing that changed my. When I was a kid and very anti drug. The thing that like changed my mind about pot legalities. I had a friend with multiple sclerosis who, like, she was my wow guild. And she got. We got on like a webcam chat so she could show me how her hands were shaking as her friend prepared a joint for her. So she. And like, how. And I was like, oh, of course.

[Gabe Dunn]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, right now. That was all it took for me. Right. Some. Sometimes you do get stuff that is that miraculous for certain things, but not for something that's as complex and as wide ranging as just depression. Right, right. That's just. I don't trust anybody making claims like that. So as time goes on, it becomes clear that deep sleep therapy has a lot of deadly issues with it. Patients undergoing it have a high tendency to contract pneumonia. They get bed sores that often get hideously infected, in part because since these people are unconscious for days on end, the orderlies are supposed to be taking them to the bathroom. But if you're just letting someone sleep, maybe they're not. Maybe they're putting them in a diaper, maybe the diaper overflows. Maybe they're not changing the diaper often enough. And so you have bed sores that then people get shit wedged into. Not good for your health.

[Gabe Dunn]

For the, for the video, people that can see my face. Yeah, you get it. But for the audio listeners, I would say through like 75% of what Robert's been saying, my mouth is just wide open.

[Robert Evans]

It's not pleasant.

[Gabe Dunn]

I am so shocked.

[Robert Evans]

And this is not everywhere that does this. There are good facilities where. And in the good facilities, people still die because the treatment is inherently dangerous and a bad idea. But they're not dying of bed. They're not getting bed sores. Right. They're not sitting in their own shit. But there are places where that happens. Right. And in all cases, even when you're doing this, well, there's a risk of blood clots because people are on their backs laying down for days at a time. And when you do that, you can sometimes you pop a fucking clot. Right, Right.

[Gabe Dunn]

The medical term is pop a clot.

[Robert Evans]

Pop a fucking clot. There's a lot of risks with this shit. And it becomes very clear as time goes on. And so a lot of doctors start criticizing the therapy and people pull back from it. A number of practitioners stop using it, a number of hospitals stop using it, and the practitioners that are using it, most of them substantially narrow the scope of its prescription. Right. They start sending out less and less and are more discriminating about when they use it. By the time World War II ends, the vast majority of patients who are getting deep sleep therapy in the UK are war veterans with what we now describe as PTSD. And I gotta tell you, thinking back to 2017 was when I had my first really bad PTSD break. There was like a three to four week period where I was borderline psychotic. Like I, I was not making rational decisions. I could, like, I couldn't hold a thought together. Like I was. I don't know how to describe you if you haven't been there, like, how disorienting and debilitating it was. If I could have just been unconscious for three or four weeks, I probably would have said yes.

[Gabe Dunn]

Yeah, but do you think that would have helped you?

[Robert Evans]

No, no, no. The data says it wouldn't have. Right. But I do understand. I can see how in good faith a doctor would be like, this is probably the best thing for this guy. And I can see how a fucking vet would be like, please just knock me unconscious for a while. Like, as long as I. You promise I won't dream? Yeah, let's fucking do it. You know, like, I get why people try this.

[Gabe Dunn]

Yeah. I mean, I have, I have bipolar disorder. And during mania, I would have. I could see like people, well meaning family members or something being like, knock him out. Knock him out so that he can't do anything to himself.

[Robert Evans]

Right. And it's the. I should also note here that by this point in time in the uk, when they're prescribing these soldiers, they're not knocking them out for days at a time. The standard length of treatment is less than a day. Right. They're doing that sometimes for like regularly, like periodically you'll go in and they'll knock you out for hours, but they're not, they're not being unconscious for days at a time.

[Gabe Dunn]

So what did help you?

[Robert Evans]

Oh, me? Yeah, time. Some amount. Some of it was therapy. It's mostly just like time, honestly. Like, it's, it's, it's mostly just time, like kind of PRN in the moment. There's some, some medications that offer some benefits to some people, but when you actually look into PTSD medicine, there's a lot of, like, efficacy is not always very high for the medications. That have been prescribed traditionally for ptsd. Time is the thing that's had the biggest impact on me.

[Gabe Dunn]

And these people don't want time.

[Robert Evans]

Well, yeah, they don't want time. And the doctors are like promising them they don't need it. Right, right. So you see, both. These are not. This is not like a lot of con cures where, like, parents are shooting bleach into their kids to stop them from having autism or something. I understand and sympathize with the people who would think this might work with the patients who would agree to this. Right. It'd make.

[Gabe Dunn]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

I probably would have at this point, at that point in time, if I'd been dealing with fucking war trauma or something. I could see myself being like, yeah, man, knock me the fuck out. Right? So among most psychiatrists then, who are still using deep sleep therapy have significantly, like, tempered down it, right? You're not knocking people out for days at a time anymore. You're only using it in a couple of cases. But some psychiatrists, a small number, still see deep sleep therapy as having a massive value. And the primary use it has is that when someone is unconscious, they can't stop you from doing stuff to them. Right. And I don't mean. I don't mean if in, like the gross, although that probably does happen. I mean electroconvulsive therapy, which is at this point, as I said, a common treatment for all manner of mood disorders and compulsive behaviors. Because it's scary and unpleasant, a lot of patients refuse to have it done to them. So doctors start telling them, okay, what if I knock you out and you're not awake and we use electroshock therapy? You won't be aware of it or remember it. So some patients say, okay, we'll try it Then some doctors, though, and that's fine, right? I mean, again, time proved it's not by a good idea. But that's consent. If the doctor's saying, hey, can I knock you unconscious and use ECT on you? And you say, yes, that's consent, right? Some doctors are like, well, if they're already unconscious, why do I need to get consent? I can just shock them. Like, fuck asking them. I'll just do it. You know, what are they going to do, right? Well, they'll be barred the fuck out. If they say, why did you do ECT on me? I'll say, you agreed to it while you were barred the fuck out.

[Gabe Dunn]

That's what I was going to say. Are they. Are they later saying that they did it or is the person, like, not aware that that's what happened.

[Robert Evans]

Usually. Often people don't find out. And when they do, they're generally. Because we have a good amount of. Generally when they find out and complain, they're told, no, no, you agreed to this, you know, right. Here's the paperwork. Right. So this is not a high point for medical ethics. Dr. Donald Cameron, the famous Canadian understatement. Yeah, yeah, okay. Dr. Donald Cameron, the famous Canadian physician who experimented with deep sleep therapy, was later criticized for drugging and shocking patients without their consent and exploring practical torture techniques. As a psychiatrist, he was advising, I think, the government on how to torture. How theoretically torture should work, right?

[Gabe Dunn]

Oh, theoretically, yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Dr. William Sargent, the prominent UK physician that I mentioned earlier, wrote this about electrocuting patients without their consent in a medical textbook that was published in 1972.

[Gabe Dunn]

That's so recent.

[Robert Evans]

It's really recent. Here's Billy Sarge. Many patients unable to tolerate a long course of ECT can do so when anxiety is relieved by narcosis. What is so valuable is that they generally have no memory about the actual length of the treatment or the numbers of ECT used. After three or four treatments without narcosis, they may ask for ECT to be discontinued because of an increasing dread of further treatments. Combining sleep with ECT avoids this. All sorts of treatment can be given while the patient is kept sleeping, including a variety of drugs and ect, which together generally induce considerable memory loss for the period under narcosis. As a rule, the patient does not know how long he has been asleep or what treatment, even including ect, he has been given under sleep. One can now give many kinds of physical treatment, necessary but often not easily tolerated. We may be seeing here a new, exciting beginning in psychiatry and the possibility of a treatment era such as followed the introduction of anesthesia to surgery. So Sargent is saying DST is invaluable because sleep therapy in and of itself works. This is the future of all psychiatry, because the future of psychiatry is knocking your patient out and doing whatever the fuck you want to them until you fix them.

[Gabe Dunn]

Well, one, how do you even define fixed? At that point, you're just like a blank.

[Robert Evans]

And there's a. I got a lot of questions.

[Gabe Dunn]

Well, sure, yeah, I'm asking. Yes, right.

[Robert Evans]

And.

[Gabe Dunn]

And two, your body still remembers. Like, if you. If someone broke your leg and then knocked you out and then you woke up and your leg had been healed, you would still have effects of, like, a broken leg.

[Robert Evans]

Right, Right. Yes, yes. The body keeps the score, which is certainly true in The Case of a Broken Lake Speaking of bodies, you know who's killed a lot of people? Not the sponsors of this podcast. Here's Ads

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[Robert Evans]

And We're Back so Deep Sleep therapy speaks to a powerful desire among many mental health care practitioners. We want to be able to treat our patients under the hood without interference from their conscious objections or comments.

[Gabe Dunn]

Jesus Christ.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, not great. This brings us back to Dr. Harry Bailey. Bailey became aware of Dr. Sargent and his methods while he was doing his 15 month world tour with the WHO. He worked alongside Dr. Sargent for a period of time and observed him treating his patients. When Bailey returned to Australia, he was full to bursting with exciting new ideas. He quickly convened Callan Park Mental Hospital to establish a cerebral surgery and research unit, which opened in 1957 with him as the director.

[Announcer]

Can we talk about how menacing Dr. Sargent sounds?

[Robert Evans]

You said it's a pretty cool name. You said it's a cool name.

[Announcer]

And I was like, oh, I don't

[Gabe Dunn]

know about that guy.

[Robert Evans]

What I would like to find is a guy with a last name sergeant to make into a doctor and then a guy with the last name doctor and you have him join the military and becomes a sergeant and then you've got Doctor, Sergeant and Sergeant Doctor and they get married. Yeah, I don't. Yeah, I don't know what to do after that point. But yes, you go and they get married and hyphenate their name. So it's now Doctor, Sergeant, Doctor and Sergeant Doctor, Sergeant.

[Gabe Dunn]

The dream, the dream, the dream.

[Robert Evans]

Bailey begins experimenting with new ECT methods, often using various barbiturates and downers to knock patients unconscious first. Per Dr. Philip Hickey, Sargent and Bailey would mail each other, bragging about how many patients they'd knocked out each week, keeping score like Gimli and Legolas during the Battle of Helm's Deep. Like they're literally being like, here's how many people I put into a coma this week. Oh man, you're falling behind. Better knock some more people out. Which you might think maybe leads to them knocking people unconscious and drugging them who don't need it at all, even under their own standards, just because they want to win a Contest, maybe. So this all seems pretty fucked up a lot of what we've talked about, but I gotta say, what Sargeant and Bailey are doing is still fairly widely accepted behavior within their professional circles. Not all of them, but within psychiatry, generally speaking, this is not controversial at this point in time. It's certainly not something people are angry about. There is general criticism of deep sleep therapy, but Dr. Sargent and Dr. Bailey are both award winning, prominent and respected members of the profession within their field, within their countries.

[Gabe Dunn]

Now, do you know if those same medications were being used for other stuff? Like, were they giving you tons?

[Robert Evans]

Yes.

[Gabe Dunn]

Like, were they were giving you benzos for. For like, physical ailments and other things? Like, okay, one of the reasons why

[Robert Evans]

it's so hard to get benzos now is that in. From the 50s through the 70s, they were handing them out like fucking candy, especially to, like, depressed housewives who also drank because it was the 50s and 60s. And so a shitload of people lost their moms because they would overdose on benzos and alcohol. It happened a fuckload in.

[Gabe Dunn]

But I'm not talking about depression. I'm talking about, like, do they give amelbarbital to someone who's like, my kidneys hurt.

[Robert Evans]

No, no, no, no, no, no, you wouldn't.

[Gabe Dunn]

I mean, it's all psychiatric.

[Robert Evans]

I think there is a degree because some of these are used before surgery and stuff. So, yes, some of these. I don't know if it's amobarbital, but some of the stuff they use in this cocktail are used to help knock people out for other procedures. Right, because they're good for that. Yes. Okay. But no, someone's probably not getting prescribed amobarbital because, like, they've got a fucking stomachache or whatever. That would be kind of weird. So one of the issues at this point in time, and it's still somewhat of an issue today, but it's much worse back then, is that to people outside of the medical system, including people in the government, mental health care is basically a black box. No one really knows what goes on in these facilities that doesn't work or, you know, get admitted to them. And the people who don't work or get admitted to these facilities kind of don't want to know anything about them. Right. So Dr. Bailey is primarily the only people who know what he's doing are his peers and they love him. He receives the Norton Manning Memorial Prize for Psychiatry, as I said, and then, yeah, a prize for pediatrics, per the Australian Encyclopedia of Biography. His reputation high in 1959, Bailey was appointed medical superintendent of Callan Park, a large institution suffering from years of neglect. In a culture of confinement, he proved to be an impatient reformer. Within a few months, he submitted a report to the Public Service Board with detailed allegations of staff cruelty, patient neglect and daily pilfering from hospital stores. Subsequent police and Department of Public Health investigations found nothing to substantiate the charges. Undeterred, Bailey blew the whistle and dramatic newspaper headlines embarrassed the Heffron government, particularly the responsible minister, William Sheehan. Despite. The resulting Royal commission report into Callan park by John McClellans confirmed many of Bailey's allegations, while concluding that some are exaggerated. So he's looking pretty good at this point, right?

[Gabe Dunn]

He's a whistleblower.

[Robert Evans]

He's a whistleblower. There's real problems at this facility, but you're also seeing some of the signs of the later problem this guy's gonna be. Because even though there's real problems that he's right about, he's lying too. He's pretending stuff's worse than it is. He's exaggerating. He's kind of a showman. He likes drama. Right. He's also got this problem of he's. He knowingly judges up or just the truth or just lies, but he also gets very convinced of his own rightness and righteousness. And even when people around him are convinced he's wrong, that just convinces him further that he's right. And in this case, that's a good thing because this hospital did need to be investigated, but that's not going to be the case much longer.

[Gabe Dunn]

Yeah, yeah. He's like. He's like, it's not going to be bad enough to tell them this one thing. So I'll just make up a bunch of stuff and then it'll be undeniable.

[Robert Evans]

Right, right, right. And one of the issues here is that this is a good thing he does, and it makes him one of the most famous doctors in Australia at the time because he's in the news, or at least in New South Wales at the time, because he's in the news a lot. Because it's a big story that this shit got covered up. So you've got, at this point, Dr. Bailey is not just an award winning psychiatrist with widespread professional acclaim in several continents, but a crusading activist for medical ethics. Obviously, this is the guy you trust if your loved one needs mental health care. He's the best guy to go to Dr. Bailey after this point. Yeah. Not gonna be good.

[Gabe Dunn]

Yeah. Too much power.

[Robert Evans]

Yep. The Lesson here folks, is if anyone ever does anything good, you need look into it. Yeah, look into it. Throw em into the ocean. The instant someone does anything good, toss them into the sea.

[Gabe Dunn]

You know, I just think, I just think when you do that, like I see the merit of it, like he's trying, but when you do that, you, you don't get to the actual heart of the issues because you're just compounding stuff. So like your actual thing that you're worried about, doesn't it, it's not in the conversation because you're just making stuff up to have some sort of sweeping, you know?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Part of the issue is that like Dr. Bailey probably even did hamper the reform efforts by lying about.

[Gabe Dunn]

Yes, that's what I was trying to say. Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

But regular people don't know shit about that, right? He's the hero doctor. So he starts a private practice and it's immediately a success. He's making a fuckload of money. Because I don't know if y' all have noticed this, but a lot of people don't trust doctors. And so if you're the guy who's all over the news because he's the doctor who blew the whistle on a bunch of bad doctors.

[Gabe Dunn]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

You might attract a really loyal following of people who don't trust doctors. This is kind of what I mean in a different way. This is kind of what Andrew Wakefield does, Right. I mean, Wakefield doesn't ever actually bust any real problem, he doesn't ever bring up any, like solve any real problems, but he's a doctor who's trying to warn people about the bad other doctors. And if you're someone who doesn't trust a doctor, that's a really appealing kind of guy. Right.

[Gabe Dunn]

I was thinking about him. Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Yep. Bailey is very appealing when he starts in private practice. This is 1962 when he begins his private practice. And in 1963 he works out a deal with two other doctors, Ian Gardner and John Gill, to treat patients together at the Chelmsford Private Hospital. This is not a normal medical employment situation for Dr. Bailey. Chelmsford was a small for profit hospital and Bailey had helped to fund it. He's a part owner in the hospital. Via an essay on the website Waking IO, the financial arrangements revealed by the Royal commission painted a picture of systemic exploitation. Bailey received both his standard consultation fees and a percentage of the hospital's revenue from each patient. He admitted this created a perverse incentive to extend treatment duration, regardless of medical necessity, to admit patients with minor conditions who didn't require hospitalization to discourage early discharge, even when families requested it, and to maximize the use of expensive medications and procedures. Every time someone comes in and Dr. Bailey, he's like, oh, well, this. He knows this person doesn't need to be hospitalized, but he tells him you need to be hospitalized for three days. He knows exactly how much of that money goes directly into his pocket. Right. Not just from seeing a patient, but from the. He gets a cut of the cost of their treatment every time.

[Gabe Dunn]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

So every new thing he can stick on money in the bank. Right. Why wouldn't he use as much expensive drugs as possible and as many expenses. Right. That's part of why he's doing. He likes ECT on unconscious people, is it allows him to charge for an expensive procedure that he doesn't have to get them to agree to. And he can basically double his money on the fucking sleep therapy.

[Gabe Dunn]

He doesn't even have to do it.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. And he doesn't even have to do it. Right, Right, right. Or have one of his other. Cause he's got other doctors here. He often has them do it. Right.

[Announcer]

Just gonna say it. This Dr. Bailey guy. Not great guy.

[Gabe Dunn]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

So by the time he starts at Chelmsford, Dr. Bailey considers deep sleep therapy to be more than just a subject of intellectual interest. It is the core of a financial enterprise that he is starting to build. With dst, you can keep patients down for weeks at a time, and they're paying for every day in the hospital, and you're getting money for every day they spend in the hospital. Dr. Bailey used his prestige and the fact that his hospital was the only one offering this treatment in the area to charge patients between 400 and 600% more than comparable treatments cost from other practitioners. He regularly kept people unconscious and sedated for days beyond what his treatment plan suggested. To maximize the amount of time he could build via that same essay, some families reported bills exceeding their annual income.

[Gabe Dunn]

Did the other doctors, the two other doctors that were working with him, did they know that he was scamming?

[Robert Evans]

Oh, yeah, all. Several of the doctors at Chelmsford are directly implicated. They are helping him. They are benefiting. So one way or the other benefiting as well from the scams? Yes. The other doctors are very implicated in this now. I don't know if they're fully aware, especially at the start, of how bad this is. There's some, especially the doctors and nurses working early on might think they're really doing the best because again, we don't. Less is known. Right. But he's doing this for almost 20 years. It becomes clear at a certain point, this is just a grift that's hurting people. Right?

[Gabe Dunn]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Speaking of grifts that hurt people, you know what my favorite grift is?

[Gabe Dunn]

Products and services.

[Robert Evans]

No ending this podcast for the day because I'm tired. We'll be back Thursday with more. You want to plug your pluggables at the end here, though?

[Gabe Dunn]

Sure. These are what one would call my products and services.

[Robert Evans]

That's right. You can.

[Gabe Dunn]

You can go to my substack, a thousand naturalshocks.substack.com there's also a just like

[Robert Evans]

ECT, by the way.

[Gabe Dunn]

Oh, yeah, didn't even think that mine's a Hamlet reference because I'm unbearable. And then there's the A Thousand Natural Shocks podcast. I also do a podcast called Best Gabe Ever. That's more lighthearted. And that's. And that's it.

[Announcer]

Yay, Gabe.

[Robert Evans]

I think I know how you and I can make a shitload of money.

[Gabe Dunn]

Is it shocking people?

[Robert Evans]

Well, not. Not exactly. I'm a doctor in the state of New Jersey, according to this plaque I received once. So we open a clinic and I give people huge doses of benzos to knock them out. And then instead of giving them electroshock therapy, we play your podcast of shots.

[Gabe Dunn]

Ooh, I really thought you were gonna say we play rem. I really thought you were gonna say we play rem.

[Robert Evans]

No. No.

[Angela Yee (continued)]

Incredible.

[Robert Evans]

Michael Stipe gets enough fucking money. All right, Gabe, thank you very much. We'll be back with part two on Thursday, folks. Until then, go to hell. I love you.

[Announcer]

Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Full video episodes of behind the Basterds are now streaming on Netflix, dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. Hit remind me on Netflix so you don't miss an episode. For clips in our older episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel, YouTube.com behindthebastards. We love about 40% of you. Statistically speaking,

[Angela Yee]

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[Angela Yee (continued)]

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[Angela Yee]

This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.